Cambridge Dictionary added “mouse jiggler” in 2025—an emblem of how employees can end up chasing visible activity when workplaces reward the wrong signals. From face-time proxies to decision bottlenecks, the piece argues that productivity metrics shape incenti
In 2025, Cambridge Dictionary added more than 6,000 new words—and one of them was “mouse jiggler,” a device or piece of software used to make it seem like a computer mouse is moving. The point is simple: it helps someone look like they’re working while they’re not.
For business leaders, it’s a small entry in a dictionary. For employers, it’s a mirror held up close to the workplace. When common productivity metrics can’t tell the difference between genuine progress and performative motion. employees learn quickly what the system rewards—sometimes even when the “work” is just staying online. keeping the screen active. or filling the day with activity that won’t show up in outcomes.
As a business owner with two decades of experience as a CEO, the author frames the issue less as deliberate deception and more as a cultural failure: people are desperate to appear productive all the time, yet the real problem isn’t effort. It’s what organizations decide to measure.
That measurement, the author argues, can reshape how work gets done—and even the transparency around rest or personal time that employees need.
Rewarding the wrong kind of presence
Time at the office has long been treated like proof of commitment. The author says the “value of face time”—time spent at the workplace. merely showing your face—is deeply ingrained in workplace culture. Research has found that leaders perceive employees who were simply observed at work (passive face time) as more dependable or more committed.
Many organizations, the author says, still lean on outdated proxies for performance: hours logged, meetings attended, and emails sent. The same metrics get applied across employees, as if disparate groups have the same functions and objectives.
At Jotform, the author describes a different setup. Employees work in cross-functional teams. Each team sets its own objectives on a mission-based and quarterly basis, and operates as mini-companies within the organization.
Employees are expected to work in the office most of the time because the author says it enhances collaboration. learning. and momentum. But when performance is reviewed. managers aren’t as interested in the number of hours as they are in measurable business outcomes such as revenue growth. margin expansion. customer retention. and speed of execution.
The author credits the approach to a shift in what teams talk about: organizing employees into smaller cross-functional teams and giving them autonomy to define missions and measure success in specific terms has helped move the conversation from face time to work that “moves the needle.”
When busyness becomes the metric, incentives harden
The author’s core argument tightens further: employees work toward what organizations reward. When people are rewarded for looking busy, performative work becomes the natural response. In that environment, the author says leaders may be incentivizing inefficiency.
Over time, the costs compound, they warn. Cultures that reward activity often struggle with burnout, misaligned priorities, and stalled innovation. Teams become busier without becoming more productive. Employees burn out while trying to maintain the appearance of constant activity—and the author says that sometimes leads to quiet vacationing.
Innovation slows as people prioritize work that is visible and measurable over work that is meaningful but harder to quantify.
The author offers a contrast: an acclaimed author who spent days lying on a picnic table, staring up at the sky, figuring out how to piece together an essay. Did he appear productive? The author says no. Was he doing valuable thinking that led to a brilliant outcome? The author says yes.
For the author, the lesson is practical: leaders have to make sure employees understand the metrics that count—and recognize how metrics create incentives.
At Jotform, teams share recent achievements with the entire company during weekly demo days. The author says teams don’t share how late they stayed at an office. Instead. they share product roll-outs that went better than expected. recurring issues that were solved within record time. and ideas that surfaced during quiet stretches of deep work.
That structure, the author argues, creates incentives to produce results employees want to share—rather than simply to maintain appearances.
The “productivity problem” that’s really about waiting
There’s another driver of performative busyness that the author says often goes overlooked: organizational bottlenecks.
When employees are waiting on a sign-off, feedback, or a crucial decision, they’re stuck in limbo. From the outside, it can look like a productivity issue. But the author says the real problem is that work cannot move forward until someone else acts.
To keep tabs on bottlenecks, the author says leaders should track how quickly decisions move through the organization. When bottlenecks appear, the author frames it as a workflow problem requiring process rethinking—not a need for employees to find one-off tasks to tackle while they wait.
The author says they break down the workflow and look at metrics including the time between identifying an issue and making a decision, the turnaround time for approvals, and the number of decision layers required before work can proceed.
Those metrics, the author says, help leaders identify where progress gets stuck. Sometimes the fastest way to increase productivity isn’t asking employees to work harder—it’s reducing the time spent waiting. Just as importantly, it shifts the focus from evaluating individual activity to improving organizational efficiency.
For leaders watching productivity scores and observing the rise of tools like “mouse jiggler. ” the message in the author’s argument is blunt: measuring activity that can be faked doesn’t just miss the truth. It teaches people to chase the wrong target—and the damage spreads from incentives to culture. from culture to innovation. and from innovation to burnout.
productivity metrics mouse jiggler workplace culture face time performative work CEO Jotform decision bottlenecks burnout efficiency